Free labor ideal

The Free labor ideal was a philosophy which developed during the 1840s and 1850s. Free labor referred to laborers who were not slaves, not to laborers who worked for nothing, and free labor ideas accounted for both the successes and the shortcomings of the economy and society taking shape in the North and the American West. Spokesmen for the ideal supported the ideas of hard work, self-reliance, and independence, and they supported the concept of self-made men such as Abraham Lincoln, who was said to have been a country-born son of illiterate farmers who went on to become a lawyer and President. Lincoln believed that wage labor was the first rung on the ladder toward self-employment and eventually hiring others.